John Heron Project

— Do you know where we are? says the girl, as they pick their way across stony, scrubby ground.

— Kind of, says May. Don’t worry. She avoids eye contact.

— What are you scared of? What’s wrong?

— Nothing.

May stands there for a moment, wondering how she’s going to get out of this place alive.

— Oh, sod it, she says at length.

May takes off the little ring of copper and brass that hangs around her neck, and letting the thong dangle, she holds it up between between thumb and forefinger. She blows through it, and it begins to glow. It’s still glowing when she lets it drop, catching it by the thong and letting it swing. She stretches out her arm and holds it out one way, and then another, until the ring gives out a sound not unlike the ringing of a half-full wineglass with a wet finger running around the rim.

May finds herself, as she steps out of the cab, staring into the empty eyes of the Herms: limbless, priapic, bolted to their posts, like the ones she read about once that they had in Ancient Greece, only the ones in Greece were made of stone. She gets that cold feeling in the pit of her gut that she always gets and thinks about Mica — and then thinks that she must not.

— That way, she says, pointing towards the waste ground.

…I still get internet abuse for saying how much I hated Star Wars, about a year ago?

And you know how a couple of days ago, I suggested that Edward Norton’s attempts to pretend he hadn’t sold out, because he was, you know, in a shitty Hollywood action movie (bit of tautology there) were idiotic?

Getting abuse for that, now. Just a few of them so far, but… you know. Great stuff, on the level of “ZOMG you’re full of shit, man! The movie really rocked! UR teh suXXors!” and so on. Yay.

Sometimes I really hate fanboys. In That Line Of Work I Don’t Really Boast About, I come into contact with a fair few of them. I think part of the reason that fanboys so often annoy me so much is less because of their uncritical devotion to stuff and more because of the kind of stuff they’re uncritically devoted to.

Because it’s almost always wholly stupid. Comic books about costumed superheroes. SHWAMs. SHWAMs based on comic books about costumed superheroes. Harry Potter. Tolkien - and don’t get me started on Tolkien. Star Trek. Star Wars, of course. The D* V**** C***. Doctor Who. Heroes. Lost. Battlestar Galactica.

In that list, I deliberately included some things that I quite like myself. I love Doctor Who, in all its glorious stupidity. Heroes is daft as hell, but fun to watch. I take guilty pleasure in the old Tomb of Dracula and Howard the Duck comics. I own a volume of 1970s Spider-Man comics (the one where Gwen Stacy cops it, since you asked). But none of these things matter in the grand scheme of things. None of these things have any real depth to them. It’s OK to like them.

But it’s not about liking this stuff. It’s about basing your identity on this stuff. It’s about having such an awful, weird sense of - oh, I don’t know - entitlement that you don’t see anything wrong in centring your whole identity around your devotion to stuff that’s lightweight mass-market bollocks, things that by design are equally as nourishing and addictive as Pringles crisps. These people think they have some sort of right to pablum, some right to abandon their lives to it, to give back every penny of the money they earned at their McJobs to the Man for trinkets and toys and DVD box sets.

Except they’re not uncritically devoted to it. But the criticism is all the wrong sort of criticism. They’ll say something sucked because that yellow robot in Transformers was the wrong sort of car, and yet fail to see that the whole enterprise was a vapid exercise in marketing wrapped around a film where blowing things up solves conflicts. Bankrupt in every way except the financial one.

It’s this weird, almost autistic obsession with minutiae and continuity rather than meaning. In fact, you almost get the distinct impression from some corners of the fanboy “community” that having the stuff and whining about it - which also comes from that same sense of entitlement. They buy everything and whinge and whine about the piddling little details, rather than taking pleasure in what they have.

And that’s the heart of it. It’s so devoid of fun. It’s all so joyless.

The dark-haired girl leans across May and taps on the glass partition.

May, sitting with her back to the driver, turns around sees in the corner of her eye the driver half-crumble, half-dissolve into a cloud of dust or mist that dissipates to nothing. The cab slowly comes to a halt.

— Well, says May’s companion. At least we don’t have to pay.

May glances at the woman, and then she turns around and kneels on her seat, opens the communication hatch and checks the meter: it has stopped. She digs in her purse and pulls out two ten-pound notes. She drops them through the window onto the front seat.

The light that shows the doors are locked turns off.

— Better start walking, then, says May.

My friend Becky got nominated for a One World award for Ethical Jounalism. She didn’t win, but did come out of it feeling better about being a journalist. Which sort of puts into words some of the reasons why I’m so proud to have her as a friend.

Pretentious, adj: Cleverer than I am comfortable with, and hence threatening.

Bleeding heart (often bleeding heart liberal), adj: More compassionate than me, and hence threatening.

Edward Norton is, as Hollywood actors go, pretty good at what he does. Well, I liked Fight Club. However, were I to meet him now, I would grab him by the shoulders and shake him bodily, and tell him to get a grip on himself.

Next would come the beating up by the bodyguards, and the suing, and the assault charges (on both sides). So I must be content with a) never meeting Edward Norton and b) never having the chance to grab him and tell him to buck up his ideas.

OK. So the point is this: Edward Norton, star of The Incredible Hulk, is refusing to publicise his film, because the extra bits he added to the film that added character depth and stuff like that were not in the final cut of the film. Because his artistic vision is compromised or something.

The message to Edward Norton, then, that Edward Norton will never read: YOU ARE IN A SHITTY HOLLYWOOD ACTION MOVIE, BASED AROUND A KIDS’ COMIC THAT CONCERNS A MAN WHO TURNS INTO A BIG GREEN MONSTER WHEN HE GETS A BIT ANGRY.

Where the hell are you going to get a “vision” for that? There is no vision there. It’s a product, a slice of mass-market toss that might entertain you a bit. And encourage you to buy action figures, breakfast cereal and kids’ clothing. And four-disc DVD special edition box sets with making of featurettes and unironic directors’ commentaries.

I think that what irked me about Norton was that he, complicit in production of this stuff, was falling into the fanboy error of taking what’s basically a stupid piece of fluff seriously as a valid expression of the film-maker’s art.

The Fanboy Error is this: not just liking the stuff, because there’s nothing wrong with deriving simple enjoyment from stupid things, but taking it seriously enough to define oneself around the liking of it. To fill your house with the spin-off crap. To take personal offence at people who don’t like this stuff. To consider, for example - as I read on a forum a while back - that changing something as inconsequential as the type of car one of the Transformers turns into is tantamount to a “rape” of your childhood.

To consider it worth fighting about¹.

No. It’s not worth fighting for, or about. It’s a disposable medium that fans and the mostly American media corporations that exploit them have made permanent, a kind of artistic landfill which, like the real ones, we’re never really getting rid of.

The girl points — they are passing the building where the Westaways live and the courtyard full of the Herms.

May shudders as she always does when she passes by here, as she did five minutes ago, when they passed by here last time.

— Aw, no, says May. Not again.

So in the cab, they talk about the Rachels, and about how exactly the dark-haired woman knows Coxy (they met at work, apparently, although May cannot parse the chronology or circumstance of that meeting in any meaningful way). The conversation dries up. The stranger looks across at May with her hands folded in her lap, her lips pressed together in a small smile. The streetlights glint off the ring in her nose, the ring in her lip, on and off. May tries not to maintain eye contact.

The dark-haired woman looks out of the window.

— Haven’t we passed here? she says.

(Authorial Note: Has been far too long since this was updated.)

Standing next to the coat check, waiting for Coxy’s friend to get her coat, May orders a cab, and now they’re out and waiting. A few people are leaving the club, the trickle before the flood, not enough for them to have to stand too close together, and yet May’s companion is standing close enough for the skin on May’s arm to tingle slightly with the proximity.

May tries to distract herself, falls into the old ritual of scanning windows, roofs, the corners of alleyways, looking for the tips of palsied fingers, for the reflection of rheumy eyes.

— There’s no one watching, she says out loud.

The dark-haired woman raises an eyebrow.

— Should there be? she says.

— No, says May.

The dark-haired woman turns, carelessly, brushes her fingers across the back of May’s hand, which is the sort of gesture that could be an accident, if May wants it to be.

Sometimes, you find out a fascinating fact about the natural world and your favourite species group that enriches your life. And sometimes, you learn something you really, really find you that wish you didn’t know (link Not Safe While Eating Breakfast).

Maybe, come October, I might get another chance. You never know.

It’s the 24th May 2008. Marija Serifovic, who resembles nothing more than kd lang, only Serbian and sort of compressed, so she fills the same volume, but is about two foot shorter, belts out the first verses of her song, “Molitva” (“Destiny”), to minimal accompaniment. And then the band kicks in. A woman appears, dressed in a bride’s dress. Any lesbian subtext there becomes blatant, when the woman blows her a kiss. Marija whips off the bridal gown to reveal a weird costume, split vertically down the middle: the right side is a suit and tie like the one Marija is wearing, and the right is a white ballgown.

A dozen or more dancing women appear back stage, all wearing that same weird costume. They dance about a bit. As the song reaches the crescendo, the women whip off that costume to reveal yet another costume, but now they’re doing that jerky-armed wide-eyed creepy robot thing.

The song ends, and Marija introduces the show. They’re still playing at being creepy robots behind her.

Asking what the hell that was about is kind of redundant, because this, dear reader, is my review of the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a superstitious person, but:

At school, I had locker 207.

In my first year at university, I moved into Neuadd Sibly, a tower block on the campus of the University of Wales Swansea, and was assigned room 207. Sibly Hall has another name now. I forget what it is.

In my third year at university, having survived a disastrous year in a shared house, I moved back into halls, specifically Beck House, an off-campus hall. I was sent to the Garden Annexe, room 207. The Garden Annexe was bulldozed about ten years ago.

When I worked for Mr. Breast, the phone extension on my desk was 207. I am reliably informed that Mr. Breast is still there. Only the other day, I ran into a former colleague who still works at Mr. Breast’s company, in fact, and who tells me that they’re going just fine.

My dad was into numerology. He would have told me that 2 was the number of balance and union. That 0 was the figure of all. That 7 was the number of thought. Then he would have found that the numerical base of 207 (2+0+7) was 9, which is the number of completion. Meaning that 207 is a multiple of nine (it is - it’s 9×23, and 23 is a prime number, which probably means something else).

And I would doubtless have said, Dad, what does that mean? And he would have told me I wouldn’t understand, in that somewhat sympathetic way he had of telling me that I didn’t get things, and would never succeed in things.

As I get older, I find myself looking for significance in things that I never did when I was in my twenties. But what significance is there to be had from something like this? What difference does it make? In the end, it’s just numbers.

FYI: Moved to a new server today. Some disruption was inevitable: I lost e-mail for a few hours and I think we lost a comment left in the time between copying the site over and deleting the old site (if you fancy leaving it again, go ahead). But on the whole, all done and dusted.

All of this brings us to Heretic Pride, which has decent production, a backing band and even - gasp - backing vocalists. Female backing vocalists. One of those female backing vocalists is the marvellous Annie Clark (AKA St. Vincent), but you can barely hear her on the song she’s on (”Autoclave”), so we’ll let that slide.

But female backing vocalists on a Mountain Goats record is a novelty to me (I never bought the umpteen records he made before All Hail West Texas, but something tells me it didn’t happen), and I think part of the reason it feels so wrong is that Darnielle is fundamentally a boy’s singer-songwriter. This is by no means to say that women shouldn’t be listening to him or that they can’t appreciate what he;s saying, or any of that crap. That would be silly. But it’s like men watching and enjoying Desperate Housewives - nothing wrong with it, nothing stopping the enjoyment… just, you know, not the target market.

If that makes sense without making me look like a discriminatory sexist tosser, I will be relieved.

Anyway, the point is that the songs with female backing vocalists work because they add a hitherto unheard dimension to the music. Or something.

The album returns Darnielle to storytelling, anyway. Rather than the apparently personal material of the last couple albums, he’s got a new cast of characters. Some you identify with; some you don’t so much, but it was always the way.

Anyway, my own highlight is the narrator of the title song, who is dragged from his home on a beautiful summer morning by an angry mob bent on killing him, and like a host of martyrs and saints before him, faces his imminent death in a state of ecstasy:

And I start laughing like a child,
and I mark their faces one by one.
Transfiguration’s gonna come for me at last,
and I will burn hotter than the sun.

I waited so long, and now I taste jasmine on my tongue.
And I feel so proud to be alive.
And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives.

Darnielle likes using thematic metaphors to unify albums; in We Shall All Be Healed, for example, he tells his stories of alienation and guilt using the language of paranoia and conspiracy theory. In Heretic Pride, his vehicle is genre fiction, from the pulp spy novel stylings of “Sax Rohmer #1″ to the quiet rantings of “Michael Myers Resplenent”.

The allusions aren’t direct. You need to have some idea of what he’s referring to, to get the point. You might know that Michael Myers is the killer in slasher classic Halloween, and there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll have an idea that Sax Rohmer wrote the Fu Manchu novels, but when it comes to “Lovecraft in Brooklyn”, you actually need to have some knowledge of the biography of legendary horror hack HP Lovecraft to really get why it’s significant to a song about paranoid misanthropy.

Woke up afraid of my own shadow,
Like, genuinely afraid.
I headed for the pawnshop
To buy myself a switchblade.

Someday, something’s coming
From way out beyond the stars
To kill us while we stand here.
It’ll store our brains in mason jars.

And then the girl behind the counter asks
How do you feel today?
I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn.

Lovecraft lived for a while in a place called Red Hook in Brooklyn, and in his time there went a bit wrong, being inspired to write some of his nastiest, and sometimes most incoherent¹ stories. The thing about invading aliens killing people and storing their still-conscious brains in jars is straight out of one of Lovecraft’s stories, actually. Not that you need to know that to sympathise with the narrator or enjoy the song, but it kind of helps.

Notwithstanding the obscurity of some of the references - I know I don’t get them all² - that doesn’t take away the fact that the album’s got power, and emotion, and depth, and you know, actual tunes. It’s well organized: the policy statement of “Sax Rohmer #1″ precedes the delicate Indiana Jones-channelling hopefulness of “San Bernardino”; the prettiness of “Tianchi Lake” follows the urgent horror of “Lovecraft in Brooklyn”. It has highs and lows.

In short, it’s at least as good as The Sunset Tree. It may be the best thing Darnielle has done. If you hate the Mountain Goats, you may find it less objectionable. But I wouldn’t bank on it.

Anyway. I’m going to take a leaf out of Robot Hero’s book and post a song. Hope he doesn’t mind.

This is still about the Mountain Goats.

So all that stuff about him not being able to sing and the crap production, why was I so instantly bowled over by We Shall All Be Healed? It’s not like I’m usually one to go for difficult-listening, really. I tried and tried to listen to Joanna Newsom before finally admitting that I could not bring myself to like it; My Bloody Valentine and Felt faced similar fates. I have cloth ears. Maybe I should just go listen to Dido or something.

Except I heard “Home Again, Garden Grove” and immediately understood. A man hides his fears about going home under a cover of bravado. Half way through, he cries out, incoherently, as if in pain or frustration. He sounds like he means it. I suppose I related.

As soon as I could, I got the immediately preceding album, Tallahassee, which is apparently a concept album about a marital break-up. Again, Darnielle uses weird metaphors and similes; Satan comes into town on the back of a truck and leaves cloven-hoofed footprints in the garden. A man in a skeleton costume walks up to a guy in a superman suit and runs through him with a broadsword. Hope is lost. Its production is no better than We Shall All Be Healed, and I didn’t find it as immediate or enjoyable, although a couple of songs (”First Few Desperate Hours”, the hilariously negative “No Children”) got played a lot, for a while.

I think I rate 2005’s The Sunset Tree higher than any of the three that preceded it. This one tells the story of Darnielle’s own abuse at the hands of his alcoholic stepfather. It could be bleak as hell, but it turns out to be both hopeful and funny in equal measure, which I suppose is the mark of a true survivor. Also, musically it’s a step forward, with a proper band and a tighter, cleaner sound. The chorus to “This Year”, although not really applicable to my own experience, became my theme tune for 2007: “I am going to make it/ Through this year/ If it kills me”. The songs are not really any better than the ones on the other albums, but the tunes are in places more immediate and hummable.

On the other hand, Get Lonely, which came out in late 2006, was a massive disappointment. It has the production, and even some decent tunes, but its unremitting bleakness is without any of the humour or lyrical firecrackers of the other albums. Which brings us to the new album, Heretic Pride.

In the last six years, John Darnielle, the man behind The Mountain Goats, has released six albums. I like the Mountain Goats. I do. But I’m really ambivalent.

Were I really clued about music, I would no doubt pretend to have been following Darnielle’s music since he was releasing cassettes recorded on a tinny boom box in his bedroom. I am not, not really, and to be honest, having heard one or two of his songs recorded in that style, I’m sort of glad. But more on that later.

John Darnielle’s music depends on the words. Which is just as well. He can only just about sort-of sing, really. As a musician, he’s no Nick Drake. But his lyrics are truly amazing, about as close as pop music gets to real poetry. Although not oblique in any meaningful sense, the songs present pictures of difficult childhoods and break-ups, paranoia and desperation. I know that sounds bleak, but Darnielle’s best lyrics. although miserable, are also laugh-out-loud funny.

Here is the video for “Sax Rohmer #1″ from his most recent album, Heretic Pride. It’s a song in which he uses metaphors from a pulp fiction novel to portray the resigned acceptance of the narrator to a sudden upheaval in his life.

The video itself more or less presents in visual form what matters in Darnielle’s songs. It’s all about the lyrics.

I can’t pretend to understand all of what Darnielle sings about, but his words are evocative. I first heard the Mountain Goats three years ago, thanks to Daniel. In a few weeks, I’d picked up three albums, and have bought every new release since.

The first album I heard in full was 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed. It portrays people who are witnesses and bystanders, people who seem to have missed the world: a man who writes thanking a friend for electrical equipment and stage make-up (”Letter From Belgium”), a man who sits beside the intensive care bedside of a friend or lover who has fallen in a gun battle with the police (”Mole”), a convenience store assistant who shoots an armed robber in self-defence and who denies he’s guilty about it but still goes down to the Catholic church on a whim and prays the rosary (”Against Pollution”). In “Quito” a man makes drunken resolutions about his homecoming that ring hollow; in “Palmcorder Yajna” someone goes on a wild bender with friends… but thinks he’s being watched.

It’s a good album, with crap production. It’s tinny; not easy listening. It sounds like it was recorded in a toilet. But We Shall All Be Healed is lavish compared with 2002’s All Hail West Texas, which was recorded on a tape player so rubbish that you can hear the motor whirring away. Notwithstanding the fact that it has at least one solid gold song-parable in “The Best-Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton”, I find All Hail West Texas near-unlistenable. I know some people who fetishise crap production, as if it’s more real somehow, more honest.

I think that’s often elitist, in the worst possible way, a means of excluding people who can’t be prepared to work through waves of tape hiss and echoey vocals to get to the music. I have heard far too many joyless indie-pop bands with off-key vocals and sound levels all over the place to sympathise with that. It’s actually a pose, more often than not - they don’t have to produce their records in a studied-yet-deliberately-inept fashion. They just choose to. I mean, I don’t think that music needs to be dumbed down

This is why I will never be an indie hispter.

But I digress.

Does my desire to see Mike Leigh’s new film Happy-Go-Lucky stem from my respect for the work of a great British director and his emphasis on truth and realism and humanity and stuff, a desire to go to the cinema and see that rare thing, an artistically worthwhile film that both Wood and Mrs Wood are likely to enjoy, or does it stem from a sad thirtysomething man’s aesthetic appreciation of Sally Hawkins?

Guess (clue: two of them are true).

It’s academic, anyway, since - big surprise! - it’s not showing in Swansea.

Sigh. Maybe the arts centre’ll have it… in like six months’ time…

A journalist goes to Lake Geneva and plays DnD with the bloke who invented it.

Actually very interesting. From The Believer, a couple of years ago.

Children’s TV presenter Mark Speight found dead, in really tragic circumstances. BBC children’s news page report.

File under “bloke on telly we quite liked dies tragically / bit sad.” That is all. Sympathies to his family and friends.

Just got a press release from my friend Symon, who works for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. At the end of 2006, BAE Systems had been in a bit of trouble for allegedly bribing the Saudis to buy their bombs. There was going to be an inquiry, but it got cancelled, because it wasn’t “in the National Interest.”

So CAAT took them to court, not for bribing the Saudis, but for ending the inquiry… and the result came out today. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, the crazy April Fools hilarity we had yesterday.

Anyway. A lot of people know this story, but I’ve been down about freelancing recently and I need to remind myself why I am doing this.

So for a while, back about seven years ago, I was the in-house writer and publicity designer for this one-horse business software firm.

The Boss calls me in. They’re getting ready the new brochure for the upgrade and he has some ideas for the design. In short, he wants the cover to have a flowchart on it.

Sorry? A flowchart? Are you insane?

And he wants it to look like a breast.

I forget my response, but it went something along the lines of: For a second there, I thought you said you wanted it to look like a breast.

Yes, he says, a breast. Like on a lady. With a voluptuous curve here and a fulsome curve here and a pointy bit here. With aspects of the software written on the arrows.

I am somewhat direct in my expression of what I think of this.

He tells me that sex sells. And that he is selling to people who own factories.

I spend the next week trying to make the flowchart look artistic and stuff… and not look much like a breast. After about three days of trying to compromise, the Boss (who shall forever after in my mind be Mr. Breast) comes in and looks over my shoulder, and says, “Can’t you make it a bit more pert?”

I went freelance not long after that.

It could get so much worse.

Actually, I was wrong. It’s pretty good.

Yeah, I’m big enough to admit that.

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Originally uploaded by carissabyers.

Not long ago, I was invited to take a small part in what may amount to the greatest birthday surprise in the history of the world. And being a small, vain, pathetic creature, and also being someone who needs to get more of his writing on his blog, because that’s what it’s for, I thought I’d show you my bit, as laid out by Carissa in the birthday book.

Hope they don’t mind.

Anne Primavesi is a feminist/ecological/radical theologian. On 23rd February this year, she presented a talk to the SCM conference. I’ve been transcribing it so that I can put bits in Movement. It was a really long talk, and very little of it is making into the magazine. But these, I thought, seem appropriate for Easter, where we remember violence and dispossession, and the act of making something good come out of the worst of things.

Very few of the people who really need to read these three excerpts will read them; those who do will not take them seriously. But then, that’s the way with all this stuff. You only preach to the converted on the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

Moriya, by Dean Paschal.

A short story which deals with a lot of the themes I like to write about, about a boy and a metaphor mechanical doll, and about how things that are beautiful and fragile get broken forever with only a moment’s carelessness.

This is where all this is coming from. Over Christmas, I took the family down to Plymouth to stay with my mum, and being widowed, she lives alone now, and so, as you would expect, she finds ways to make her home less lonely. She watches a lot of telly. And she plays loud music. Her music. Connie Francis. Russell Watson. That sort of thing. Anyway, her current favourite is the recent greatest hits package by Tony Christie, that got released off the back of the successful Peter Kay-promoted reissue of “The Way to Amarillo”.

This is where all this ultimately ends: Elvis. Read the rest of this entry »

Gary Gygax died on Monday. He was the bloke who invented Dungeons and Dragons, which is a big part of the reason why I have a steady job. That’s all. Moment of silence and all that.

AMORC stands for the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross. Now don’t get me wrong, but I thought the Rosicrucians were a secret society. Do secret societies advertise?

This one did, in every issue of Prediction I have between 1979 and 1985.